Like a Broken Cinema Film: Rethinking Faulkner's Filmic Novels

Abstract

Almost since the movies first started, people have been arguing about how films change the way we think about novels. William Faulkner, while a famous novelist, also spent a lot of time working as a Hollywood screenwriter, so it stands to reason that critics tend to argue about how this may have affected his fiction writing. In my thesis, I argue that he purposely wrote his novels in ways that rejected film techniques - in other words, he wrote to show what novels can do that films cannot. I accomplish this by analyzing two novels, Sanctuary (1931) and Absalom, Absalom (1936). By making this argument, I hope to show the problem with assuming that the relationship between films and novels is a simple, black-and-white problem. It is not enough to point out the similarities and differences between novels and films. Instead, we should consider whether the author is trying to tell us anything by experimenting with the lines between these two modes of storytelling.